Über Röck UK. “Live at The Rainbow MMX” Review

Kiss Army Warehouse, to Kiss nerds what Craigslist is to prostitute-slaughtering serial killers, have an issue of LA-based music paper Rock City for sale on their site, due to the fact that the issue (dated March 2006) carries a large Kiss article and a copy of one of Paul Stanley’s awful self portrait paintings on its cover. But also featuring on the cover are Rusty Eye, the horror metal band formed in Mexico in 1995 who later relocated to Hollywood.

Now, this could easily stack up as just another cool piece of memorabilia for the band members to pick on in their twilight years, yet there is a greater evil at work….in a good way of course.

While Rusty Eye could only ever dream of having their own Kiss-sized army of fans, they should be able to sleep soundly in their crypts knowing that they at least have their own horde of crazed creatures following their every metallic move. The interview that we carried with the band’s drummer and vocalist Miss Randall last October collected more hits than any of the other interviews in our 13 Days Of Halloween feature confirming the band are cursed with a loyal following, and that legion of doom make their voices heard on this new live album.

Recorded last April, Rusty Eye celebrated (then) fifteen years of shocking and rocking by being the first band to ever record a live album at the famous Rainbow Bar & Grill in West Hollywood, California in its thirty-eight year history. Recorded in multi-track format by Yuri Anisonyan (My Ruin, Fireball Ministry) and produced by Miss Randall herself, this seventy minute, eighteen track beast impresses on first listen by just sounding so damn good. Thankfully eschewing the temptation (that sadly infects, and possesses, many hapless outfits) to overdub the screams of a stadium rock crowd over that of a club gig, the sound of a slew of die-hard fans amid the select audience invited going crazy between songs only adds to the warmth of the recording, almost humanising the inhuman.

Between the opening intro of ‘At The House By The Cemetery’ to ‘Jerusalem Cricket Soufflé’, the impressive instrumental track from 2009’s ‘Possessor’ album that closes the show, the band tear open their jugular jukebox and let sixteen songs bleed out. ‘Those Who Flee From the Sun’, dedicated to “all the bloodsucking freaks” in attendance, is a real highlight, as is ‘The Serial Kind’, with Randall taking on double vocal duty in the absence of Circus Of Power frontman Alex Mitchell (who provided a co-vocal on the recorded version of the track) and impresses…as if that was ever in doubt. But it truly is a difficult task to attempt to cherry pick songs from this setlist (from which half a dozen songs were actually cut from the album) as all are of a great vintage, aided and abetted by the aforementioned quality of recording, and proof of Rusty Eye’s cadaver cool canon of work.

Wrapped in terrorific cover art from gruesomely gifted artist Farron Loathing (Lightning Swords Of Death), this is a must-have release for fans of the band and well worth investigating for fans of darkly-themed metal, horror flicks and great sounding records; that’s all of us, right?